I've eaten out a lot recently, and it's given me a concentrated look at wine service in a range of Ottawa restaurants. As you'd expect, it's a mixed bag, and I wonder how many of my experiences are typical.
The first thing I've noticed is how often I've had to ask for a bottle of red wine to be cooled a little. When I took a taste of my red at many places, it felt warm and flabby and lacked that freshness I expect. A slightly lower temperature brings out the acidity that wine needs to go well with food.
I never encountered any problem getting my wine chilled. Years ago, eyebrows were raised if you suggested chilling a red. Perhaps servers are more knowledgeable now -- or their clients are, and requests for red wines to be cooled are more common.
Anyway, I usually ask for a splash of tepid wine in our glasses to keep us going (and so that I can whine about it at every sip), and have the rest of the bottle cooled.
Sometimes it's put in the fridge, sometimes (which I prefer) the server brings an ice bucket to the table.
I hadn't really thought about how often I was asking for this until I went to Absinthe restaurant on Wellington Street one night and ordered a New Zealand pinot noir (Te Kairanga). It came to the table at the perfect temperature, and I suddenly realized how rare that had been.
Now, it's good that servers are happy to cool reds, but shouldn't the wine be served at the right temperature in the first place? (Whites, it's true, are often too cold, but they do warm up in the glass.)
I understand that temperature-controlled wine storage is expensive and might seem impracticable if a restaurant has a big wine list. But there's no reason not to give the temperature of wine the same care as the temperature of food.
Am I just too picky here? Are there a lot of people out there who like warm red wine?
The other thing I noticed while dining around town is how seldom wine by the glass is poured at the table. I really don't see a lot of difference between ordering wine by the bottle or the glass. In fact, you pay more by the glass than by the bottle, and you could argue service ought to be better.
The common practice is for a server to bring the already-poured glass, but I prefer to see the bottle and have it poured at the table.
For one thing, it's more likely you'll get the wine you ordered. People do make mistakes (sometimes they bring the wrong bottle when you order a bottle, or the vintage is not the one on the wine list) and if I'm paying around $10 for a glass of wine, I like to see the bottle.
Again, Absinthe did it right, and the server poured the whites we started with by the glass.
Looking over my receipts for the past week or two, I see that wine accounted for more than half the totals. That's got to be fairly common, and it's a pretty strong argument for some restaurants to work on their wine conservation and service.
Four good to very good values today.